...for Penelope HightonDa. Da. Da da.
Where is the song.
What’s wrong
with lifeever. More?
Or less --days, nights,
thesedays. What's gone
is gone forever
every time, old friend's
voice here. I wantto stay, somehow,
if I could --if I would? Where else
to go.The sea here's out
the window, old
switcher's house, vertical,
railroad blues, lonesome

whistle,
etc. Can you
think of Yee's Cafe
in Needles, California
opposite the trainstation -- can you keep
it ever
together, old buddy, talking
to yourself again?Meantime some yuk in Hamilton has blown
the whistle on a charming
evening I wantedto remember otherwise -- the river there, that
afternoon, sitting,
friends, wine &chicken,watching the world go by.
Happiness, happiness --so simple. What's
that anger is thatcompetition -- sad! --
when this at least
is free,
to put it mildly.My aunt Bernice
in Nokomis,
Florida's last act,
a poem for Geo. Washington'sbirthday. Do you want
to say ‘It's bad’?
In America, old sport,
we shoot first, talk later,or just take you out to dinner.
No worries, or not
at the moment,
sitting here eating bread,cheese, butter, white wine -- like Bolinas, ‘Whale Town,’
my home, like they say,
in America. It's one worldit can't be another.
So the beauty,
beside me, rises,
looks now out window --and breath keeps on breathing,
heart's pulled in
a sudden, deep, sad
longing, to wantto stay -- be another
person some day,
when I grow up.
The world's somehowforever that way
and its lovely, roily,
shifting shores, sounding now,
in my ears. My ears?Well, what's on my head
as two skin appendages,
comes with the package,
I don't want toargue the point.
Tomorrow
it changes, gone,
abstract, new places --moving on. Is this
some old time weird
Odysseus trip
sans paddle -- upthe endless creek?
Thinking of you,
baby, thinking
of all the thingsI'd like to say and do.
Old fashioned time
it takes to be
anywhere, at all.Moving on. Mr. Ocean,
Mr. Sky's
got the biggest blue eyes
in creation --

The Fun of the Fair: poster for New Zealand Centennial Exhibition of 1939-40, offset lithograph by Charles Haines Advertising Agency Ltd, N.Z., November 1939(Printed Ephemera
Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand)

New Zealand Line. R.M.S. Rangitata
in Gaillard Cut:poster for New Zealand Shipping Company Ltd, screenprint, early 1930s (Printed Ephemera
Collection, Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand)

25 comments:

It took awhile after Bob returned from this trip to recognize that he had determined, with all his attention and concentration and care, to change his life.

The sense of him as a person comes across very strongly here, in a relaxed, vulnerable, extremely human way that would henceforth characterize his writing -- and allow him to express the generosity of his nature more clearly and directly than ever, in it.

He had moved forward -- or fallen back -- into what he would soon begin to call "the common".

The poet Ed Sanders, a mutual friend, longtime colleague of RC, sends along this back channel comment and poem:

___

Wow, what a poem, like a salute from eternity!

Here's one of mine, from 2006,which about sums up my feelings.

Poetry and Truth

Ahh, Robert Creeley, weary of time! Lost and found!Your verse & your brillliance continue to sound

above the interplay of form and stormwhere time may be bent but nothing is spent

Ahh, Robert Creeley, gone to the ground!Your soul is your voice, it doesn’t repent

You held to the values beyond pale desireFamily & friend, & the music of fire

Ahh, Robert Creeley, source of the foamNo one can mash your heart in the loam

But yet we still wince who knew you so wellWho can’t hear your footstep at afternoon’s bell.

Bob Creeley makes you feel OK, and that's a big deal. The only currency is time and it's good to hear it over and over. As Dylan says, "If you can't bring any good news/don't bring any." Bob's poems are always good news, no matter how pissed, so salutations, friend, wherever you are.

The differencebetween what I rememberand what I want to remembercatches me up.Both come unbidden, suddenly there at night in a dark room or at under a canopy of trees ablaze with sunlight.Waiting. The one—oh, not that again,but this one instead,if you please. But both arewhere I lived onceand live againor live yet.

The recurring image:moving across a trackless high desert at dawn with others,a face.

Nora, yes, same Ed Sanders, great enduring original inventive American genius artist, investigative reporter and language-maker... We were once inglorious beatniks together, when Ed and his lovely wife Miriam lived on Avenue A just above Tompkins Square Park and I dwelt amid the cockroaches on the other side of the Park, on Fourteenth Street between Avenues A & B.

Those must have been the days.

Very happy you share my delight in that Hafiz lacquered manuscript cover; I thought that, as a librarian and artist, you might appreciate that.

It is held in the Alexander Turnbull Library, where, as it happens, Angelica, as a young girl, was known to haunt the shelves.

Here's what the library says about that treasure:

"The cover of this Persian manuscript is decorated with a scene painted in watercolours onto lacquered leather which is then covered with several more coats of lacquer."

Lovely memorial that, particularly the "left no trace" bit -- would that we could all one day have that said of us.

Colin,

Sorry your poem here disappeared during my afternoon blank-out (long term effects of accident one year ago), and I find yesterday's now missing too -- do forgive me for putting that one back up, if I may:

I believe we can live together

in a kinder way he said burying his headin his hands The roar of something came over thendarkening the skyand sucking out all the air . . .

This is ridiculous! (Hero-worship wise, that is). Now I have DVS saying, "I'm with Kent."

So, DV, where do we put these guys in the bat order? And who else fills the lineup card? I know it's a day late on the Tomblog, but just hours away from Opening Day in Detroit versus the Murderous Rowmans.

I don't know if I've got what it takes to step up and speak for De Villo, here.

Still, as it's opening day and all...

If I'm Jim Leyland I'm going to sneak back into the tunnel, have a smoke and give that question a long, lean country think, Kent.

Then I'm going to come back, and by the time I'm in the dugout again, I'll have my lineup ready.

My considerations in picking the Tigers I decide to run out are these.

What I want in a Tiger is protection, loyalty, friendship, companionship. Ferociousness. I want that Tiger to protect me, and have my back, to the bitter end. If I have a fight, I want my Tiger to jump in, even if I'm winning, even if my Tiger's only ninety pounds.

I like strong Tigers -- not necessarily a masculine Tiger, but a strong Tiger, say a Tiger that runs a corporation, a CEO of a corporation. I like a strong Tiger with confidence, massive confidence, and then I want that Tiger to be completely prepared to get down to serious country-hardball Tiger work.

I like to watch batting practice like a Tiger watches their prey after they wound them. I want them to know I'm watching. I want them to remember me, in a bizarre way I want them to love me -- and watch them, just watch them. But always from a distance. I want those Tigers to keep a certain distance for at least twenty to thirty minutes before the first pitch.

And then I believe I'll run out these guys, one to nine plus DH.

Sumatran tiger (Panthera tigris sumatrae)

Siberian tiger (Panthera tigris altaica)

Bengal tiger (Panthera tigris tigris)

Indochinese tiger (Panthera tigris corbetti)

Malayan tiger (Panthera tigris jacksoni)

South China tiger (Panthera tigris amoyensis)

Bali tiger (Panthera tigris balica)

Caspian tiger (Panthera tigris virgata)

Javan tiger (Panthera tigris sondaica)

Liger or Tiglon (Panthera hybrid)

(I'll probably start out with that lefty-hitting Liger against Nova, but you can expect to be seeing Tiglon in there at some point before the night's over.)

Now I know a few of those Tigers I've just named are totally extinct. But so are Hank Greenberg, Mickey Cochrane and Ty Cobb. And you're not going to hear anybody say those guys weren't real honest to goodness Tigers, are you, Kent?

Now I think we have a shooting script for "Mr. Clark Goes To Tigertown."

(Not real shooting, of course, that would be cruel.)

I've petitioned Hopwood scholar Bruce Shlain to recount his encounter with sd Mr. Greenburg during the '68 Series (Coming Soon!).

My realest Tiger brushup was about five years ago when Willie Horton walked into my bakery. My friend and counter keeper Jan says, "Kent, do you recognize who this is?" K replies, "The man whose hand I've wanted to shake for most of my life." The kindest manner with the most ruthless tiger-jaw grip you can ever imagine.

Just catching up, great to see all this -- I saw RC read from this notebook on Lizzie Ehman/Grace's deck one Sunday afternoon in Bolinas, just after he'd returned from New Zealand (can it be?) -- "It's one world // it can't be another."

4.4

light coming into fog against invisibleridge, birds beginning to call in fieldin foreground, sound of wave in channel